Apollo's Angels

A History of Ballet

By Jennifer Homans

Jennifer Homans begins and ends her weighty new cultural history of ballet with a provocative old claim: Ballet is dead. Let's set aside the obvious question of why anyone would invest 10 years of research and

643 pages in a moribund art; let's set aside, too, Homans' withering tone and spurious framing (we'll get to that). Forget the possibility that this death-knell sounding might be merely a shrewd publicity maneuver (Homans seems too earnest). Ignore, for now, the panicky reactions - pro and con - that the slim epilogue to "Apollo's Angels" is sure to provoke. Predictable controversies should not be allowed to obscure the tremendous achievement of this book.

Because "Apollo's Angels" is an important addition to the literature on ballet: intellectually rigorous, beautifully written, brilliantly structured. Homans, a former professional ballet dancer with a doctorate in modern European history, rarely strays from the cultural historian's detached and deeply contextualizing perspective.

And so in "Apollo's Angels," the history of ballet becomes a history of nations and nation-building. We move steadily from ballet's beginnings in the courts of France, through an isolated flourishing in politically stable Denmark, through crass acrobatic innovations in unstable Italy. The chapter on ballet in Italy seems unnecessarily long, but it is not: Those tricks en pointe and circus-like fouettes become the foundation for a more artistically invigorated flowering in Russia, where ballet thrives first as the art of tsars, then as Communist propaganda. Which leads to the Cold War ballet battles of East and West. And Homans crowns her geographic narrative with ballet in the United States, and with the Russian émigré who made ballet American: George Balanchine.

At every juncture, Homans isn't merely describing events in ballet, but asking why, and how: Why did a precise logic of communicating harmony and humanist idealism in the body take root here and not there, in this sort of society and not another? The explanations are fascinating: revolutionary allegories lurking in the French Romantic ballets; huge "serf theaters" of trained peasants in Imperial Russia.

But Homans' background as a dancer matters as much as her research. She has a visceral understanding of ballet as an evolving physical language of many dialects. She understands more deeply than most historians why the precise placement of a foot in tendu speaks volumes about who you are and what you believe. She is not timid in issuing verdicts on the merits of choreography, and her analysis is grounded in an understanding of ballet's inherent ideals. As she writes, "Classical ballet is an art of formal principles; take those away and it disintegrates into crude pantomime."

And so she sees substantive contributions to ballet's development in Frederick Ashton but not Kenneth MacMillan ("he consistently sacrificed his talent to an obsessive desire to make ballet something it was not" - ouch); Jerome Robbins but not Robert Joffrey. Roland Petit and Maurice Béjart are among the populist revolutionaries whose sex-fueled "innovations" she calls empty. (This reader happens to largely share her judgments, though I would debate some of her thoughts on Antony Tudor, especially.)

Homans is also, not surprisingly, gifted at analyzing the performance styles of dancers, and connecting them to the zeitgeist. I love Homans on hands: Maya Plisetskaya's splayed mitts communicate Soviet vigor; Margot Fonteyn's unpretentious streamlined fingers capture the triumph of civility over wartime despair.

Trained at the School of American Ballet, Homans has an insider's understanding of the "religious cult" of Balanchine and his New York City Ballet; I personally am something of an outsider worshiper, and I don't think Homans overplays its profundity, or the void felt in the 27 years since Balanchine's death. I am disappointed, however, that Homans did not feel the need to apply the historian standards that permeate most of her book to more recent ballet history.

It would take an entire second review to adequately respond to her 10-page epilogue, "The Masters Are Dead and Gone." Where to begin? The blanket dismissal of today's dancers as unexciting and uninteresting? The claim that we are in an "era of retrospective" without any mention of choreographers such as Christopher Wheeldon, Jorma Elo, Yuri Possokhov, Alexei Ratmansky, Wayne McGregor and - most glaringly - William Forsythe? The sweeping generalizations about today's "fractured" culture? I don't mean to argue the opposite of Homans, and say that ballet surely will rise again. But in concluding so emotionally that "I now feel sure ballet is dying," she abandons admirable analysis for unsubstantiated forecasting.

The polemics aside, "Apollo's Angels" is an illuminating history much needed now. I hope that today's ballet viewers will read it. More important, I hope that today's ballet makers will wrestle with it. Perhaps by reading it, younger choreographers will find their place in the evolution of ballet that Homans so rigorously depicts - and in doing so, write the next chapter of the story she believes is over.